


Interlude (for what we have received)

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [11]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Christianity, Gen, Headcanon, Jewish Mulder, Judaism, Religion, Roman Catholicism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2015-06-24
Packaged: 2018-04-05 21:54:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4196262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He would never be absolved by the confession of his sins</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interlude (for what we have received)

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: n/a  
> A/N: I've always had the headcanon that Mulder is Jewish, and I know others have as well, including David himself. I'm not Jewish, but I've tried to do my research. Please let me know if anything is incorrect.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Mulder avoided churches. They reminded him of too many Sundays growing up, facing the whispers from the pews behind them. 

It hadn't been bad when Samantha was there. He hadn't really believed, but there were pigtails to tweak. When he'd been little, his mom had bribed him with baseball cards. He kept them in his jacket pockets to distract Sam, or hid them between the pages of the hymnal. Nobody else would sit in the Mulders' pew. They were People in town. Pillars of the community.

Even after Samantha was gone, they left a space for her on the polished wood.

At home, his mother kept the menorah in his room. She had steadied his hands when he was small, helping him light each slim candle, and he had helped Sam. Eight nights of light. He stumbled over the unfamiliar words with their flavor of mystery. 

"This is your heritage," she told him, once and only once. "This is who I am, and that means this is who you are. Never forget."

"I thought we were Christian," he said. 

She gazed at him steadily. "There are things we do to make life easier, Fox. There's no shame in protecting your family. But you can't forget where you're from."

"Why doesn't Dad help?" he asked.

"Your father doesn't always hold onto things," his mother said.

They went to church every Sunday. They bowed their heads for the homily. They sipped grape juice and let the wafers melt on their tongues. They did not go to temple. There was no synagogue in Chilmark or Quonochontaug. They didn't keep kosher, although there was always lamb for Easter. They did none of the things that would set them apart. He understood that would jeopardize his father's work, his mother's reputation. They lived in small towns, and all the players in his sandlot baseball games ate bologna on white bread. Mulder, like a child of divorce, spent only holidays with his heritage, and the rest of his time putting on a good face for the mothers of his friends.

After Sam was gone, his mother watched silently as he mumbled his way through the blessing and droned what he could remember of the song. They sat together in the candlelight with the curtains drawn. For Purim, his mother distributed spring-themed baskets of food to her circle of friends among the important wives and Mulder pressed a few dollars into the hands of the children in church with worn clothes. They did these things without speaking, as if it were any other day.

On Rosh Hashanah, they ate apples and honey, but after Samantha, the years were never sweet.

He didn't keep up with much of it after he left home. The high holy days slipped past without notice. He didn't sit in the chapels at Oxford, unless he needed a moment of quiet contemplation or the sweet melancholy of Christmas hymns. He forgot his prayers. He had always been looking at his own history through the pinhole lens of a camera obscura, a glimpse at a time, and now even those images were blurred. 

When he wept for Samantha, after the abduction and return of the girl in Iowa, he wept in a church, alone, thinking of those Sundays with a space beside him, and the last two slices of apple always left on the plate, drizzled with honey.

He envied Scully the simplicity of her unwavering faith: in the scientific method; in her god; in the government by the people, for the people. From time to time when she came into the office, her hair was scented with incense, and Mulder breathed its perfume and hoped for a moment of peace. He would never know the ecstasy of transubstantiation. He would never be absolved by the confession of his sins. For him, the beauty of the scripture was only as deep as its poetry. Judaism made more sense to him. If a god existed, surely he, or she, or it, was unknowable, unnameable, beyond the bounds of human comprehension. But even that he saw through a glass, darkly, knowing only in part, without even the certainty that he might find some measure of solace in Shabbat.

He had faith. He had good works. He had his inscribed Bible from his confirmation on the bottom shelf in the office (the better to riddle out the messages of the maniacally devout) and in his bedroom, wrapped in newspaper, the menorah he'd bought on a weekend trip to Paris. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, he ran as the faithful were called to prayer. There was a simplicity to it, a purity. He sweated out the angst and tribulation of the week. He found the core of himself and tested his limits.

There was his faith: in the way Scully answered his call, in the way something unseen that might be revealed if only he persevered, in the way the voices kept calling from the wilderness.


End file.
